Olivia O’Leary

I notice that BBC Radio 4 announcers regularly pronounce Ms O’Leary’s family name as /əʊˈlɛəri/. I suppose from her accent that this is what she calls herself, but I’m wondering if following suit when one does not have an Irish accent is mimicking her rather than representing her name in ‘neutral’ terms. For those unfamiliar with Radio 4’s output, Olivia O’Leary is the presenter of “Between Ourselves”, a discussion programme that deals with a single issue in each edition.

To start from a different example. True to my roots, I pronounce bath with the TRAP vowel (as John Wells says in Accents of English, it would seem a denial of my northernness to change this). A friend of mine comes from the City of Bath, and he insists that I am mispronouncing his city. On the other hand, he pronounces Newcastle with the same BATH vowel (not a good key word in this discussion!), regardless of the fact that most Novocastrians from either Newcastle upon Tyne or Newcastle under Lyme will use the TRAP vowel. In my view, he is right to say /…’kɑːsl/ and I am right to say /bæθ/ – both in the terms of our own accents.

To return to Ms O’Leary. In her accent, I assume she calls King Lear /lɛər/. Certainly, when the Short Brothers Lear Fan Jet plane was in the news, Northern Irish commentators called it the /lɛər fɑːn/, but this did not persuade others to pronounce it in the same way. In my view, Ms O’Leary should be pronounced /əʊˈlɪəri/ by the announcers from other parts of the UK. By trying too hard to get a close approximation to her own pronunciation, they might appear to be simply making fun of it (and by extension, her).

8 Comments

I wonder how much this perception – of people makng fun rather than being neutral – might extend to consciously faithful pronunciations of foreign words and place names, where such pronunciations diverge from the standard Anglicized form.

In my native (staunchly monolingual English-speaking) region of Canada, for example, using an “box” vowel [ɑ] (cardinal 5) rather than an “at” vowel [æ] when saying “Iran” or “Iraq” would come across as pretentious. This is despite the fact that the “box” vowel is more faithful to the native pronunciation of these words, and completely compatible with English phonotactics.

Pronunciations that violate English phonotactics come off as even more pretentious. For example, paying attention to quantity distinctions in Italian consonants. (To be fair, I only remember seeing this in a movie, spoken by a very pretentious character.)

Unless Ms O’Leary’s pronunciation has changed radically since she was on Irish TV back when I lived there, I expect she pronounces her name much as I do, which is to say /oʊˈlɪːri/. Some regional Irish accents would indeed pronounce her name with an /ɛ/ vowel but neither hers nor mine is one of them. (She is from Carlow and I am from Dublin.) So the BBC announcers’ rendition is doubly strange.
I listened to the beginning and end of several of her broadcasts available on the net, hoping to catch her in the act of pronouncing her own name, but to no avail.

So did I. Pathetic, aren’t we? But I had made the same assumptions as you. I can only think that the names of the presenter and the jet plane are examples of both Southern and Northern Irish ɪːr being perceived as ɛər by mainland Brits in the BBC because in the context of –r it does not have the close i they expect in Irish accents.

I guess we all agree that such mimicry between accents of English is absurd, especially incompetent mimicry, but surely varying degrees of approximation to a realistic pronunciation of non-naturalized words and names in other languages can be appropriate in varying circumstances.

But even non-mimicry can seem extreme to people who disapprove of Brits of any sort. I cannot resist contributing an anecdote of my own. I was berated by a friend for calling him hju:ɪ (not his real name) məkˈmɑːn (he could do a parodic RP), and told in no uncertain terms that his name was kjʉi makʲˈmaχən. I said I would attempt that if he would desist from calling me ˈmɛɪχəl lɑːm. This arrangement soon lapsed.

She’s just done a programme on Asperger’s Syndrome, during which she pronounced the Austrian doctor’s name, Asperger, with a hard G and the common shortening of the condition, Asperger’s, with (the common, in Britain) soft G. This apparent contradiction is particularly irritating to many people who have Asperger’s Syndrome, as may be seen on their self-help websites, but she stuck rigidly to it.

She also pronounces her own forename unusually, as though it were O. Livia . . .

Oh! Olivia O’Leary, why must you be so wary? Why can’t you be more sweary? O. Livia, O. Laoghaire.

Nick –
I stick to the pronunciation /ˈæspɜːgə/ for both the doctor and the syndrome, but I noticed that it was not only Ms O’Leary, but her two guests – both afflicted with the syndrome – who used the alternative /ˈæspɜːdʒəz/ throughout the programme, so in this instance, I would not be too hard on her!